A translation may be performed to interpret the meaning of text from a first language to a second language. A translation is not a simple word-for-word correspondence between any two languages. For a translation to be useful, the translation should take into account constraints such as context, the rules of grammar of the first and second languages, and writing conventions and idioms of the first and second languages.
Machine translation (MT) is a machine-based technique for generating translations. For example, a computer-based translation program may analyze a source text and generate a target text without further human intervention. Machine-based translations are often combined with human intervention, however, in the form of pre-editing and/or post-editing, to improve translation accuracy.
A translation memory is a database of translations that is designed to aid human translators. Translation memories are typically used in conjunction with a dedicated computer assisted translation (CAT) tool, a word processing program or other editor, terminology management systems, multilingual dictionaries, or even raw machine translation output. A translation memory includes text segments in a source language and their translations into one or more target languages. A text segment can be a block, paragraph, sentence, phrase, or other segment of text. Translation memories are commonly used on translation projects to leverage work and improve consistency across the content being translated.
Some machine translation tools enable human users to generate corrections to machine translated text. The generated corrections may be stored and used for future translation engine training. However, the generated corrections are not viewable to other users of the machine translation tool. An example of such a machine translation tool that is accessible via the Internet is translate.google.com (for beta languages only), which is published by Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.